In the manifesto, posted by someone calling himself Allan Quatermain – presumably not his real name – defines GamerGate as

a grass roots consumer rights affiliation of people, men and women of good character, humane consciences, and principled beliefs [who] have voluntarily joined together to combat more effectively the evil forces which now threaten our freedoms, our hobby, our way of life and the civilization we love.

Quatermain described the enemies of #GamerGate in similarly vivid terms. The evil Social Justice Warriors, he wrote,

seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things. On the plain of action, until the SJW’s can be stopped from their subjugation of all western society, there will be no opportunity for us to move forward at all. …

They deceptively appeal to every motivation in human character, from sordid selfishness, to practical politics, to misguided idealism. They have gradually beguiled a lot of very good people into joining the attack on us, until the maligning of #gamergate has probably exceeded in intensiveness and extensiveness that faced by any other organization in all of western history.

I was all set to write an essay describing how the rhetoric in Quatermain’s manifesto resembles the rhetoric of other reactionary, conspiracy-minded movements in American history, drawing upon historian Richard Hofstader’s famous essay The Paranoid Style of American Politics.

But then I started getting a little paranoid myself. While many GamerGaters see their, er, “struggle” in similarly apocalyptic, some of the language in Quatermain’s post seemed weirdly old-fashioned, almost as if he were cribbing from some old John Birch pamphlet on the “communist menace” from half a century ago.

That’s because he was. I pasted a few sentences from Quatermain’s essay into Google and discovered that they did in fact come straight from an old John Birch newspaper ad from the 1960s.

In fact, the whole essay is essentially a verbatim copy of a giant chunk of that John Birch society newspaper ad, with the words “John Birch society” replaced by “GamerGate” and “Communist” replaced by “SJW,” and a few other references changed here and there.

That bit from Quatermain’s essay I quoted above describing how SJW’s allegedly “seek always and everywhere to bring about more interference, less individual responsibility and an amoral way of doing things?”

Well, here’s the original paragraph as published by the John Birch Society in a newspaper called the Reading Eagle in January of 1966.

Comments

It’s appalling how many small indie devs get like this. Like I know that that’s your hard work and all, but goddamn take some criticism. If your game is shit, your game is shit. Go back, make it better, and try again.

I think the worst part is they’re charging money for something that’s so obviously a copy-paste job, then trying to defend their copy-pasting as being “good for the game development community and helps keep it afloat” like, nah bruh. Creativity helps the indie GD Community. Shit hacks like your game only make the community look terrible.

As for that removing your eyebrows then painting them back on again, that was sort of accidental for girls a bit older than I am. Older sisters of some of my friends, Elvis generation rather than Beatles generation. (Now that I think about it, the style — eyebrows only, not the hair — is very reminiscent of those old silent movie heroines.)

They used to pluck their eyebrows so thin and so often that the hair eventually stopped growing back. If you see a 70+ woman who has to draw her eyebrows on every day, try and picture her as a teenager in starched petticoats and a wide black elastic belt jiving to Rock Around The Clock.

@kitteh: the FHC have convened and pointed out that most of them are, in fact, furry and so they much prefer fur (they refuse to use the word hair). And one of my cats makes the most awful “help me I’m being abused/oppressed” if he touches any bare skin with a paw.

@ParadoxicalIntentions: I had forgotten about that, and they have exceptionally short term thinking if they believe that courting negative publicity means they are going to be successful in the long term /runs off to read up.

The problem appears to be that WordPress is sending an SSL certificate with *.wordpress.com as the name, which doesn’t match the name of your site. (I don’t know if you’ve gotten your own SSL certificate.)

I don’t know if there’s any way to tell WordPress not to allow HTTPS connections or how to configure WordPress to use your own SSL certificate instead of WordPress’s. Hope that helps?

Even though it’s small potatoes compared to, y’know, everything, what struck me the most about that game was the blood graphic around the borders. I remember using that exact same graphic as practice when I was first learning how to use Photoshop as a kid about 15 years ago, and I cut it out from the background better than they did.

Roosh has a second update disavowing his association with the author of the plagiarized article and — get this — urging anyone who notices similar transgressions to contact his… “ethics officer at ethics@reaxxion.com“.

I kid you not:

“Editor’s Update 2 (1/10/15): The author of this article, Allan Quatermain, has not gotten back to me about the similarities his article shares with one published by the John Birch Society. After some investigation, I’ve concluded that deliberate borrowing has indeed taken place. This is at at odds with standard journalistic practice that we follow here at Reaxxion. Therefore we will no longer accept articles from Mr. Quatermain, and all his past work will be reviewed. Please contact our ethics officer at ethics@reaxxion.com if you suspect plagiarism from other authors. —Roosh”

The idea of Roosh having anything to do with ethics is so silly it fills my daily quota for the absurd. That “ethics officer” is probably his three plush monkeys sitting next to his computer screen with their eyes, ears, and mouths covered in perpetual horror.

Feminism CAN help them get a date though! If the men would start listening to feminists and stop treating women like receptacles for their sexual desires, then maybe they’d be dateable.

Well, they seem to think that except for feminism women would WANT to be [nothing but] receptacles for their sexual desires. They fantasize a glorious pre-feminist time when that was what women wanted (perhaps not quite aware that — to the extent such a time actually existed — it was because women had no choices.) They create an echo chamber evidently based on the assumption that instead of talking to women, getting to know them and trying to find out what they want from a relationship, you’ll do much better grousing and kvetching about women with your buddies. Why would you talk to women? Why would they know what they want? And in the land of the dateless, the dude who got lucky once is king. They keep hoping that one of their buddies will hit on the cheat code that will enable them to get laid without having to put any effort into establishing a personal connection with a woman. They don’t get that one of the basic ideas of feminism — treating women as real people who are just as much human as men are — is the key to success in developing relationships. But sorry, dude, there’s no cheat code — you’ll just have to grow up and become a real person yourself. Yes, I know it’s difficult — I feel your pain.

The fact is that most of them do start establishing personal connections with women eventually, but they make it harder on themselves — and women — than it needs to be. And the last thing they need is “helpful advice” from MRAs, PUAs, and other assorted anti-feminists telling them that women really want to be dominated. Yeah, that’ll work.

These things seem so obvious; the cluelessness is stunning. Feminism is here to stay, you aren’t going to beat it, so relax and join it. You’ll be happier that way.

They keep hoping that one of their buddies will hit on the cheat code that will enable them to get laid without having to put any effort into establishing a personal connection with a woman.

Another irony being that they put more effort into this search for the Holy Cheat Code and complaining about how terrible their lives are, than they’d need to put into just talking to people as people.

@kitteh: Absolutely. You can probably tell how frustrated I get watching these guys make their own and other people’s lives a bit less satisfying every day through their lack of self-awareness and inability to see what should be obvious. If you could amputate their organ of projection I sometimes think just that would make everyday life 10% better.

Random #GamerGate laughs of the day: This complete dumbass, assuming it’s not fake (minor warning for sexist slurs, since this is #GamerGate we’re talking about here). For people who haven’t played the more recent Mario games, Rosalina is popular because she’s the first fleshed-out woman in the series, and Daily Dose (subtlety is not his strong suit) is not happy about it. Man tears ahoy.

We Hunted the Mammoth tracks and mocks the white male rage underlying the rise of Trump and Trumpism. This blog is NOT a safe space; given the subject matter -- misogyny and hate -- there's really no way it could be.